Bliss Was It in that Dawn to Be Next Door

Dispassionate
analysis of social and political problems is what is needed to build a better
society. Thirty Moroccan youth activists seize the chance, in the process moving
the author, who meanwhile finds himself drawn into the country’s language wars.

Putting the bubbles
back in Perrier

Early this year I attended an event in London which
included a panel of young activists from countries across the MENA region. One
of them was a vastly bearded, cheery and articulate Egyptian salafi from the
al-Nour Party. Someone asked him from the back of the room, “Tell me honestly,
did your party have any policies when it went into the elections?” With a
seraphic smile and a shrug of his shoulders the whiskery young Egyptian
replied, “Truthfully, No.”

That seems to me to be the predicament of the MENA
region right now – a sudden rush of new actors in politics and society, but no
tools. You can make revolutions without policy, but it’s close to impossible to
build a better politics and a better society in the same vacuum. This is
perhaps why the new regimes of the region, for all their radical rhetoric, seem
often to be going on governing with little but the same set of visceral
political assumptions as their autocratic predecessors, one pharaoh stepping into
another’s shoes.

So about a year ago the British Council here in
Morocco put together a project designed to teach young people ‘policy
analysis.’ I find this phrase slightly daunting, and what we were actually
trying to teach was how to think dispassionately and analytically about social
and political problems: how to assemble evidence, test hypotheses, write
convincing policy scenarios and then communicate them effectively. We did this
with partnership from RIIA Chatham House, superb training input from Niccolo
Milanese of European Alternatives, and funding both from the British Council
and the Foreign Office’s Arab Partnership Initiative.

About half the young people involved were Moroccan
(well, we had the idea and found the money!), and the other half came
from countries across the region – Algeria, Tunisia, Jordan and Egypt. They
sweated it out at policy boot-camps in Mohammedia, Tunis, Rabat and by the Dead
Sea in Jordan. Between times they worked with mentors in their own countries,
and with each other in transnational teams, on policy briefs, researching and
outlining policy options in areas of their choice.

It wasn’t all easy going, and the learning curve was
steep. One of the key issues – back to the young Egyptian I mentioned above –
was the difference between policy and politics. Since the distinction
exists in neither Arabic nor French, both of which use the same word for each
of the pair of concepts, this was a tricky issue, and we found ourselves
discussing it for many weeks. But at last, there came a point, just when we
were beginning to despair (as in all good fairy stories), when one by one the
distinction became clear and was internalized, and after that progress was
fast. The subtext of the whole project, of course, was empowerment, and here it
came.

The analogy that struck me was the way Perrier water
is treated at Source Perrier: first of all the bubbles are extracted, in
an arcane and puzzling process for which I have no rational explanation; and
then after the water (or perhaps the bubbles) have been scrubbed, they are put
back together again. What we were up to was similar. The results, along with
all the technical skills that have been acquired, the confidence, the assurance
and the determination to make a difference, are amazing. We can see the shape
of a policy-driven politics, a real novelty for most of the region’s
politicians; and a desperately needed elixir.

Last night we met to present the project one year on.
One of the presenters, Asmaa Fakhoury, was asked by a slightly pugnacious
questioner about her reactions to Revolution – how, the questioner asked, could
intelligent young people not engage with the revolutionary impulse? How could
they accept the way the Moroccan constitution was jobbed through its approval
process? Well, said Asmaa (and I’m paraphrasing her from memory) that may be
so, I don’t know. But what we are trying to do is something very
different: it’s to get away from passion and noise in politics; and to try to
assemble evidence-based recommendations for measured, rational, effective
change. Only that way can commitment be translated into powerful, engaged,
intelligent action.

Tremendous! That was when I realized we had done
something rather special. And when I say ‘we’ I don’t mean the British Council,
or our partners. I mean the group of 30 or so young people from across the
region and – last night in particular – the dozen-and-a-half young Moroccans.

I never expected (not in my wildest dreams) to find
policy analysis emotional – but last night as I listened to the
presentations, and the mature, enormously impressive handling of questions and
answer, I felt that we had set something in motion that is already striding off
into the future; a small but astonishingly effective contribution to the
reintegration of politics and policy in this country and in the region. We have
watched the creation of a small, high-impact organization which we shall soon
be proud to partner.

There’s one more thing. You’ll notice that I haven’t
mentioned what sort of policy they’ve been writing, and in what policy areas.
That’s because it’s a whole culture, a process, an ethically defined toolkit,
that we’re talking about. It’s none of my business now (fascinated as I am and
shall remain) what sort of policy they are working on: that’s their call. I’m
interested in how they do it, and how they change the thinking behind
government over the next decade.

The YAANI website carries a growing amount of
material, including the policy papers that were written for, and delivered at,
Chatham House three months ago. Have a look at it. It’s at ya3ni.org, and there’s quite a lot of
information there. If you look carefully you’ll find you can download their
first volume of work, Policy for a New Generation.

Language
wars

On my desk in front of me I have a copy of The
Little Prince, or rather al-Amir al-saghir, translated into
‘Moroccan Arabic,’ by Abderrahim Youssi. I bought it a few weeks ago from a
newspaper stall in Marrakech, more as a curiosity than anything else: I read
Arabic only very slowly, and in ‘Moroccan Arabic’ written in Arabic script, my
progress is glacial. But it’s an interesting and symbolically important little
book, because it focuses for me a current debate on language that is going on
in Morocco. Is there a national language? If so what is it – or rather what
should it be? And how does it relate to that elusive creature, a national
identity?

A useful way in is a polemique that has gone on
in Morocco’s excellent new monthly history magazine, Zamane. It started
with one of those slightly artificial interviews where two people argue on the
page, under the headline Que faire de l’arabisation? (What’s to be done
about arabisation?). The two polemicists were Youssi, who is both a professor
of linguistics and a translator into ‘Moroccan Arabic;’ and Abdelkader Fassi
Fihri, Director of the Institute of arabisation. The two of them came from the
angles one might expect: Youssi arguing strongly for a written Moroccan Arabic
– a standardised literary darija – and Fassi Fihri for a universal
‘Modern Standard Arabic,’ which he is at pains to distinguish from Classical
Arabic – rightly, no doubt, though the distinction seems scarcely relevant to
his argument.

The latest round in this perennial contretemps blew up
with the cahier des charge for the audiovisual sector, which raised the
question of increasing broadcasting in Arabic on TV and radio. This was always
a likely move from the new PJD-led coalition, and arabisation has also been a
long-term policy of the second coalition partner, the Istiqlal. However, the
language question has evolved in the last eighteen months: the constitution of
July 2011 guarantees equal rights for Tamazight, and as well as predictable
cries of pleasure and dismay, this development has highlighted the rumbling
question of Moroccan identity, and whether it is indeed an Arab identity, or an
Amazigh identity, or something more nuanced and complex and Moroccan.

Fassi Fihri is at pains in the interview to depict
Arabic as being on the defensive, and its proponents as simply looking for a
restoration of its traditional place in Moroccan culture and society. He plays
down the link with religion, and plays up identity, while attributing
linguistic policy, historically at least, to the governing class. Today,
arabisation is, in his view, popular and democratic. He adds, disingenuously:
“I don’t wish to enter into a political debate,” while doing just that,
adducing linguistic democracy and the popular will.

For Youssi this is all nonsense. “We are continuing,”
he says, “in a preposterous manner, to function on a linguistic framework which
has been a failure for 13 centuries.” The two men debate the use of Arabic
during the events of the Arab Spring and its popular credentials. Fassi Fihri
cites massive use of Arabic on the internet and the flourishing Arabic press in
Morocco: Youssi ripostes with a paragraph that is worth quoting in full (my
translation):

“As for me, I ask myself how large is
the proportion of Moroccans who actually master the Arabic language. When we
talk of figures, I’d recall that half of the population is illiterate, and that
even among the part with the opportunity of going to school, there are perhaps
10-15% who master it and use it effectively and functionally. To take up again
the example just cited [i.e. of the Arabic press], the principal Arabic
newspaper has a print-run that is ridiculously small in relation to the
population. It’s clear that this situation doesn’t promote culture and
literacy. The written Arabic language is definitely not the mother-tongue of
Moroccans. Look instead at the classroom and the television programmes imposed
on young children. Just like French, Arabic is in terms of accessibility, a
foreign language, which has acquired too much importance and too great a
position in our society. As a result, the number of children who quit their
studies during the primary years because they feel excluded, is alarming.”

This seems to me to sum up the situation very well;
and the equating of Arabic and French as two languages that are inaccessible
and foreign to most Moroccans, is clearly right. Youssi talks of the
sacralisation of Arabic, its closer and closer ties to religion; and he rebuts
any suggestion that darija isn’t supple or expressive enough to do the
job, with his own record of translation (“All my experiments at translating
into the Moroccan language have been successful, whether of Saint-Exupery’s Little
Prince, or an English Romantic poem of the nineteenth century – The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner”).

What I find fascinating about this debate is quite how
political it is, and how untransparent. Morocco has a rate of illiteracy of
around 45% even by the indulgently minimalist standards used to measure
literacy. Measured by easy reading, by comfort with, and pleasure in, a book,
I’d guess that the figure is much greater, perhaps 80% or more. Whatever else
one can say about this, it is a human and developmental tragedy; and it must
have something to do with the language situation in the country.
Particularly interesting is the fact that Abderrahim Youssi is one of few
people who base their arguments about language on the question of literacy
(Fouad Laroui is another: see my post on
his bookLa Drame Liguistique Marocaine) – on what would make it easier for people to read, rather
than what language they ought, for quite other and imperative reasons,
to be reading.

And this is what seems to me as a foreigner, whose own
native language is none of the half dozen historically in play in Morocco, to
lie at the heart of the debate. The vast majority of discussion of the language
question is about defending social, economic, literary or religious interests,
not about how to encourage literacy and the accumulation of cultural and
intellectual capital in Morocco. Arabic, however inaccessible to most Moroccans
(mastered, as Youssi notes, by well under 10% of the population), is favoured
by the religious and the traditional, Istiqlal and the PJD. It is the language
of pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism, as well as – undeniably – a major vector of
Morocco’s history, literature and thought. In addition, Arabic has clearly been
a symbol of opposition to Francophone elitism.

French, on the other hand, is the language of the
post-colonial, modern elite. Youssi writes: “The example of the French
Missions in Morocco is a good demonstration of this problem. Those children who
have access to them profit from an unparalleled tool for social advancement. In
due course they have access, automatically, to advantageous and senior jobs.” Documenting
this, a recent book by Moha U’Hrou Hajar (La mission Française au Maroc vs.
La mission de l’école Marocaine) analyzes graduations from the Mission
lycées and finds that since 1956, 200 families have provided 33.75% of the
Moroccan graduates, 50 of those families supplying 21.36% and ten of them
9.84%.

For any country to develop effectively, literacy needs
to be a common good, and this means that language must be understood as a tool,
not an asset to be reserved, hoarded or defended. It seems to me that there are
two quite separate questions: which language, functionally speaking, will most
easily serve as a common written language, encouraging rapid progress against
illiteracy? And which languages need care and attention paid to them for
reasons of culture, history, religion, academic communication and shared
heritage? The answer need not – indeed is very unlikely to be – the same. If it
was, we might still be speaking Latin in Europe.

Of course in Morocco any linguistic future will
involve several languages. Youssi’s Common Moroccan and the Common Tamazight
that is growing and flourishing rapidly; and Arabic and French (quite apart
from other foreign languages). Arguments must be about utility, about what is
conducive to making Morocco a literate and reading nation. This, it seems to
me, requires that the language which children speak at home, at their mothers’
knees, be the language in which they learn to read. Otherwise, it is all too
clear, they do not learn to read. As Fouad Laroui wryly remarks, the only
people who actually speak Arabic at home are Brazilian and Mexican telenovela
– soap – actors dubbed for Moroccan viewers.

Arguments about history, culture, ethnicity and
religion as determining the choice of language are topsy-turvy: children who
read comfortably and fluently in one language – their mother tongue – will
learn much more easily to read in others. This is not a zero sum game, though
too many polemicists make it one.

Laroui quotes Mohamed Zainabi, editor of El-Amal,
a magazine written entirely in darija: “In the suq Lakhmiss in Salé, I
was thrilled to see shopkeepers who had never taken the slightest interest in
the press, forget for a moment their businesses to read my magazine.”
That seems to me to be the point. In Turkey there’s a plan to give
every child a Kindle to start them reading – reading is seen as the key to the
future. In Morocco nationalistic and ethnically based arguments about language
seem fated only to hold the nation’s children back.

Martin Rose has lived abroad for most of the last 30 years, in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Italy, Belgium, Canada and most recently Morocco, where he was the Director of the British Council in Rabat. He now lives in England. In his column, under the title Bliss Was It in that Dawn to Be Next Door, he contributes on culture, education and language, and on events in the region. His blog is Mercurius Maghrebensis.

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